The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  A quarter mile up the street, the wall was punctured by a gate, the Saint Joseph portal. I turned right, through the gate; behind me, a horn blared angrily. Checking the mirror again, I saw that a white panel truck—service vehicles look the same the world over—had run a stop sign and cut in front of the black sedan, tucking in almost on my bumper. When the light at the intersection turned green, I threaded the car through the narrow opening, then turned immediately right onto the three-lane road, Saint Lazarus Boulevard, which ringed the outside of the wall to my right. The road was like a modern-day moat of asphalt, swimming with cars rather than barracudas. Out my left window was the emerald-green Rhône, and as I checked my mirrors for the BMW, I caught a brief glimpse of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge downstream. The banks of the river in this stretch were lined with barges and dredges, as well as old canal boats that had been transformed into luxurious houseboats. A small crane was bolted to the stern of one of these canal boats, and dangling from a cable, hoisted high above the reach of thieves, was an old-fashioned three-speed bicycle, much like the one gathering dust in my garage back home.

  A quarter mile upstream the road branched; one lane continued to hug the wall, while the other dived into a tunnel. A road crew was working near the mouth of the tunnel, and a flag-man was motioning cars slowly forward. As I approached, he stepped from the curb and began waving his flag. I braked, but he waved my car through, as well as the white panel truck behind me, before stopping the line of traffic. At the front of the line of stopped cars was the black BMW, and I smiled as I imagined Junior fuming at the delay.

  Halfway through the tunnel I slammed the car to a stop, put the gearshift in neutral, and leaped out, leaving the engine running. Behind me, the side door of the white panel truck opened, and out sprang a gray-haired man who could have been my brother, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt that mirrored my own outfit exactly. My look-alike nodded to me, tucked himself into the Peugeot, slammed the door, and took off. I hopped into the van, and the door slid shut. Inside, I could barely see Descartes in the dimness; he was just finishing a radio transmission, and as he did, I noticed a pair of headlights through the rear windows, rapidly closing the distance with our slow-moving van. “It won’t take him long to catch up with the Peugeot,” Descartes said. “That was très bien fait—very well done. Twenty-three seconds.” In less than half a minute, the switch—taking me out of the Geneva-bound car and putting a double in my place—had bought us a day’s delay. A day and a half in which to find the hidden bones or—failing that—to get the Native American skeleton that was en route from Knoxville. It was, I suddenly realized, another switcheroo: a look-alike, a stand-in—and it was standing in for another fake relic at that.

  When we emerged from the tunnel, our driver turned right at the first intersection. The black BMW roared past, its speed and dark windows defeating my efforts to see the driver’s features.

  “The decoy—my doppelgänger; the fake me,” I said to Descartes. “Who is he?”

  “Just one of our inspectors; a guy who happens to look like you.”

  “Lucky him,” I said. “How much danger do you think he’s in?”

  “On the way to Geneva, zero. On the way back, maybe more. They might try to ambush him and get the bones.” The inspector shrugged. “He has military experience and tactical training. He’s smart, a good driver, a good shot. He can take care of himself. But risk is part of the job.”

  The van lurched as the driver doubled back toward Avignon. “You think Junior will fall for it?”

  “Let’s hope so.” He waved a finger at my clothes. “He saw you get into the car dressed like this, and he’ll see your double get out of the car dressed like this. So unless something makes him suspicious, he’ll assume it’s you.”

  His “unless” dug into me, the way a splinter on a rough wooden railing can snag a passing finger. “What might make him suspicious?”

  He shrugged. “If they had someone watching at the other end of the tunnel, maybe they noticed the extra twenty seconds it took for the car to go through. The police, we might notice that kind of thing. Your FBI might notice. But these guys aren’t that good. They’re fanatics, not cops or spies.”

  “Fanatics brought down the World Trade towers,” I pointed out. “Never underestimate the power of fanatics.”

  “I don’t underestimate their power,” he said. “Just their capabilities. As far as we can tell, only the preacher and the big guy came to France for the bones of Jesus.”

  “The bones of not-Jesus,” I corrected.

  “True,” he conceded, “but we can’t tell that to them. If they learn the truth, they have no reason to keep mademoiselle alive. We must pray that they continue to have faith in our lies.”

  I wasn’t much of a praying man, but there in the back of a lurching van bumping its way back to my hotel, I sent out a request to God, or to the universe: Whatever it takes, truth or lies, help me get Miranda back safely. I thought of Meister Eckhart’s criticism of the hypocrisy of praying Thy will be done but then complaining about the outcome. But I wasn’t praying Thy will be done; I wasn’t that virtuous or pious. I only wanted Miranda back, safe and sound.

  The van turned again, entering the old city, and hugged the wall until it reached the tower that faced Lumani. The driver pulled onto the narrow sidewalk and stopped with the van’s side door directly aligned with Lumani’s wooden gate. “Stay here,” Descartes reminded me, “until the decoy gets back from Geneva.”

  “Do I have to? This feels like house arrest, and it’s gonna drive me crazy. I’d really rather help you look for the bones.”

  “It’s too risky,” he said. “If the preacher sees you, he knows you’re not in that car. Then he kills mademoiselle. Non, you must stay out of sight. We will keep looking for the bones. Now go.” He tapped the van’s driver on the shoulder. The driver got out; luckily, he was skinny as a rail, or he’d never have managed to squeeze through the narrow gap between his door and the wall of the house. Stepping into the street, he checked carefully in both directions, then gave a quick, low whistle. Descartes slid open the van’s side door, and without even having to lean out the opening, I put my key in the lock and opened the wooden gate. Then, in one step, I was inside the sheltering wall, latching the gate behind me. This maneuver took even less than the twenty-three seconds in the tunnel. Très bien fait, I thought. And Please, bring her back.

  CHAPTER 40

  A40 Motorway, Switzerland

  The Present

  IN A THREE-MILE STRETCH OF TUNNEL CARVED through the mountains on the route from Geneva, Switzerland, back to Lyon, France, a black BMW whips to the left and surges forward, rapidly overtaking the old Peugeot that’s chugging up the gradual grade. The German car rockets past the French one as swiftly as Hitler’s tanks darted around France’s Maginot Line back in 1940; it cuts in front and then brakes hard. The hulking bald driver, Junior—a name he hates, even though he, too, uses it for himself—checks his mirror, expecting to see the Peugeot’s hood dip sharply, expecting to hear tires screeching in a panicky, reflexive stop—after all, the gray-haired guy in the piece-of-crap Peugeot is some kind of egghead professor, right?—but instead, the Peugeot darts to the right, wedging itself between the decelerating BMW and the wall of the tunnel.

  Metal rasps and shrieks as the Peugeot rakes the entire passenger side of the BMW, clipping the outside mirror at the same moment it rips a warning sign off the right wall of the tunnel. The Peugeot driver’s window is down and suddenly Junior sees what appears to be a pistol in the professor’s hand: a pistol pointed out the open window; a pistol pointed—shit!—at him. Next thing Junior knows, the Beemer’s passenger window is shattering and he’s ducking for his life, and the Beemer is veering wildly to the left, where it slams into a concrete abutment, pushing the radiator back into the engine block and knocking the left front wheel off the frame. The steering-column airbag explodes, punching Junior in the face, breaking his nose, adding injury to insult. He’s
not sure which hurts worse, the broken nose or the knowledge that he’s been outmaneuvered and outsmarted by an aging egghead in a piece-of-crap car.

  CHAPTER 41

  Avignon

  The Present

  EIGHT ENDLESS, NAIL-CHEWING, GARDEN-PACING hours after I’d climbed out of the van—as the afternoon sun was casting long shadows across Lumani’s courtyard—my phone rang. “The preacher’s muscleman just tried to ambush our decoy,” said Descartes. I felt a jolt of fear, and sweat began beading on my forehead and trickling from my armpits. “Shit. What happened? Is our guy okay?”

  “It’s okay,” he hurried on. “You got away. The muscleman’s car is wrecked, so that’s good; maybe he’s hurt, maybe not. Our guy didn’t stop—without backup, he couldn’t take the risk, and besides, we didn’t want to blow his cover. But you need to call the preacher right away, so he still thinks it’s you on the highway.”

  I forced myself to breathe slowly—once, twice, three times—and then said, “Okay, tell me what happened. And tell me what I need to say.”

  “It was in the Chamois Tunnel, about fifty kilometers west of Geneva. An hour after you left the bank. The muscleman passed you in the tunnel and tried to force you to stop. You made a shot—”

  “Good God, I shot someone?” I was shocked by the idea that I—even a counterfeit I—might shoot someone.

  “We don’t know if you hit him. All we know is that the muscleman’s car ran into the wall in the tunnel. He’s not following you anymore. You should call the preacher now, before he hears from his guy.”

  “THIS IS BROCKTON,” I SAID WHEN HE ANSWERED. “That was really stupid, Reverend.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got a good mind to turn this car around and go dump the bones in Lake Geneva. A spot so deep you’ll never find them, no matter how long you look or how hard you pray.”

  “I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brockton.” His words said that, but his panicked undertone told me otherwise.

  “You’re lying, Reverend. Either that, or your goon’s spinning out of control as badly as his car did just now.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “What car?”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. The black BMW your bald-headed ape was driving. The one that just crashed into the wall in the Chamois Tunnel.”

  Another pause. “There was a wreck in a tunnel? Was anyone hurt? Are you okay?”

  “Gee, thanks for your Christian concern, Reverend. I’m just fine, but I don’t know about your muscle-bound friend—call me hard-hearted, but I didn’t stop to play Good Samaritan. Maybe he’s just shaken up, maybe he’s dead—and if he is, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I’m on my way back to Avignon with the bones, and if you actually want them, don’t you dare mess with me again. God forgives, but I don’t.” I hung up the phone and, as Descartes had instructed, I switched it off so Reverend Jonah couldn’t call me back—at least not until we’d made him sweat for a while.

  Meanwhile, I was sweating, too. We’d gotten a break and gained an advantage over the end-timers, but I didn’t want to put too much stock in it. If Junior had escaped unhurt and managed to get out of the tunnel and get another car quickly, our advantage might last only a few hours. And then what?

  THE KNOCK WAS SOFT, BUT IT NEARLY MADE ME jump out of my skin anyway, and I gave a startled yelp of surprise. “Excusez-moi, Docteur,” said Elisabeth’s voice. “Sorry you have fear when I knock.” I yanked open the door, grateful for the distraction, cheered by the warmth in her face, and relieved by the sight of the immense package she cradled in her arms. “This just came for you.”

  The FedEx airbill confirmed what I’d expected and hoped: The package was from Knoxville, which meant that it contained the decoy skeleton overnighted by Hugh Berryman. I’d expected the airbill to be attached to one of our standard bone boxes, a foot square by three feet long, but what Elisabeth had lugged up the three flights of stairs was the size of a small footlocker. I thanked her, set the box on the bed, and ripped it open even before she’d started down the stairs. Inside the outer box, I found the long, narrow bone box I’d been expecting, along with a second box, a cube measuring about eighteen inches on each side.

  Lifting out the bone box, I set it on the desk and raised the long, hinged lid. Hugh had chosen well. A forensic anthropologist would never mistake this Native American skeleton for the one we’d found in the Palace of the Popes—this skull was broader and flatter, and the front teeth were the shovel-shaped incisors characteristic of Native Americans and Asians—but apart from those differences, it closely resembled our missing man: Meister Eckhart or Jesus Christ or whoever the hell Stefan had been trying to sell for two million dollars. Hugh had also done a good job of simulating the wounds to the wrists and feet and ribs: Besides gouging the bones, he’d dabbed the splintered edges with a mixture of tea and coffee, a stain that mimicked the patina of time, making the fresh trauma look as ancient as the bones themselves.

  Satisfied with the decoy skeleton, I turned my attention to the other box, the unexpected one. Taped to the top of it was a card, a pen-and-ink illustration of Don Quixote on horseback, his lance raised, windmills in the background. Underneath were these words in Hugh’s handwriting: “Ephesians 6:11.” Puzzled, I ripped open the box. What I found inside gave me a chill. I opened my computer and Googled the citation. It was a Bible verse from Saint Paul’s letter to the fledgling Christian church at Ephesus. “Put on the whole armour of God,” it read, “that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Saint Paul, I decided—or maybe it was my own Saint Hugh—was a pretty smart guy.

  THE PIECES OF OUR PLAN WERE COMING TOGETHER, though with maddening slowness. The decoy skeleton was the piece I’d been most worried about, and it had arrived on time and in excellent condition. The decoy ossuary should be coming soon—the stonemason had promised to deliver it no later than 10 P.M. And barring unforeseen problems, the decoy Brockton should make it back to Avignon before midnight.

  Midnight was just four hours away—hours that I suspected would seem like centuries.

  I SWITCHED MY PHONE BACK ON—I’D LEFT IT OFF for two hours to keep Reverend Jonah twisting in the wind if he tried to call me again—and sure enough, the phone showed a missed call from his North Carolina cell number. I had a voice mail, too, and the instant the message began playing, I felt the instinctive revulsion that the televangelist’s voice never failed to trigger in me. My revulsion swiftly gave way to panic, though, as his words floated up and their implications sank in. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” he said. “You are not to be trusted. If you try any treachery when we meet, the girl dies. If I even think the police are watching, she dies. If you stall or bargain, she dies. And if the bones are not genuine, she dies.” My heart skipped a beat when he said it. “I have photographs of the teeth,” he went on, and I thought my heart would stop altogether. “Before I came to terms with your friend Stefan, I had him send pictures of them. I’m no big-shot forensic detective, but I swear by the blood of Christ, if the teeth don’t match exactly, the girl will die, and so will you.”

  I stared at the phone in my hand, hoping it wasn’t real, hoping this was a nightmare message, hoping that if I stared at the phone hard enough, clenched it tightly enough, I would awaken.

  I did not awaken; the message was indeed a nightmare, but it was a waking nightmare. Flinging open the lid of the bone box, I lifted out the cranium and mandible, and grew dizzy with despair. I’d hoped and assumed the preacher wouldn’t be tipped off by the decoy’s shovel-shaped incisors, but I saw now that those were the least of the problem. The real problem was the number of teeth: the decoy had four more teeth than the missing skeleton had. Even a preacher inclined to have faith in miracles was not credulous enough to believe that the skull of Christ had sprouted four new teeth twenty centuries after his crucifixion.

  Frantic now, I called Descartes, who was still searching
the labyrinthine corridors and crannies of the Palace of the Popes. “You’ve got to find those bones, and find them fast,” I said. I recounted Reverend Jonah’s call, and his threat. “He’s not going to fall for it,” I said. “There’s no way. Even a child could tell that these teeth aren’t the same.”

  Descartes was silent. Finally he said, “We’ll keep trying, but we’re running out of places to look. See if you can get more time.”

  “How do I do that, Inspector? We were pushing our luck with Geneva. He’s getting suspicious. I’m afraid he’s about to snap.”

  “I don’t know. Try to think of something. We have two more towers to search. You probably won’t be able to reach me—the only reason I got this call is because I stepped outside to call my office. I’ll phone you back in an hour.” He hung up, leaving me staring at the phone once more, my blood pressure soaring, my ears ringing, my heart racing. In a fury of frustration, I screamed—a wordless bellow of rage—and kicked savagely at the closest thing to me, the heavy wooden frame of my bed. It hurt—I wondered if I’d broken my big toe—but I didn’t care; I hauled back the other foot and kicked the bed again. The bed scraped across the floorboards…and something clattered to the floor. Crap—had I broken the bed in my anger? Kneeling on the floor, I peered into the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight, the way Miranda had shown me.

  The light glimmered off something made of metal: a bracket? a bolt from the bed? Lying prone, my head pressed against the nightstand, I fished it out. It was a key—an antique-looking silver key with a large oval head and several stubby ribs jutting from the spine. For a moment I thought it was Stefan’s skeleton key to the palace, but it wasn’t, not quite. The palace key had been ornate, practically a work of art, its head cut with intricate scrollwork and filigree; this one, on the other hand, was utterly unadorned—a blue-collar sort of key, more likely to be carried by some medieval janitor than a cardinal or chamberlain. It wasn’t just the head that was simpler; so was the shaft—it had only three pairs of ribs jutting from the spine, not half a dozen. Suddenly it hit me, and I ripped open the desk drawer and rifled through the jumble of papers and receipts until I found the note Miranda had left on my nightstand after spooning up behind me in my bed the night after we’d found Stefan’s body. “A souvenir,” the note said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it’s important.” When I’d awakened that morning and found the message, I’d thought that the note itself was the souvenir—an odd one, I’d thought, but then, Miranda’s mind often worked more obliquely than mine. But the words, I now realized, made more sense if they referred to something else—something that had fallen off the edge of the nightstand, perhaps, and lodged behind the bed…until this moment. Was this a key Stefan had given her? Or had he lost it in her hotel room the night he tried to persuade her to come with him?